1. Beating a Senate incumbent is still really hard. Even when the votes go your way, the incumbents have any number of dirty options at their disposal. It happened in Alaska. Now it happened again.

The system itself is corrupt and winning an election means beating the system. The bigger the election, the harder the system pushes back. It's an elastic effect. Scale that up and you can see how hard winning the White House becomes.

This is why the left started at the bottom. It's much easier to take over organizations from the top than the bottom. You have to become the system before you can beat the system.

2. The Tea Party brand has been severely damaged. That is to be expected. Even the left doesn't stick with a brand. It uses innumerable front groups. The Tea Party brand should be retained as feeders for recruitment, but it might be wiser to route actual work through groups branded with names like "Reform" and "Change".

And that takes me to...

3. The ongoing problem on the right is that it talks 'extremist' and legislates 'moderate' while the left talks 'moderate' and legislates 'extremist'.

That's a big part of why Obama is in the White House and conservatives are still struggling to make headway.

Obama isn't in the White House because Americans woke up Communist one morning. I know that "Free Stuff" is a popular theory, but people always liked free stuff. The larger welfare population helped shift the balance, but if Obama had been a non-viable candidate, there would have been no balance to shift and it would have done him as much good as it did Jesse Jackson or Dukakis.

Obama is in office because much of the country believes that he is a moderate and a centrist.

The left can get away with it because it talks centrist and lives radical. If the right is ever going to do better than another liberal Republican, its candidates are going to have to talk like liberal Republicans while legislating well to the right.

It is doable. Rand Paul has been doing the talking part well enough. Unfortunately he talks the talk so well because he actually is well to the left.

And that's the bigger problem.

Lefty candidates can have a certain amount of trust from the base because they are committed to an ideology. Obama's supporters knew that he was for gay marriage and racial polarization no matter what he said. The right needs candidates who are ideologically committed so that trust stops being an issue.

NOT A ONE

There can be no conservative case for amnesty because there is no such thing as a conservative case for a policy that will not have a conservative outcome.

The only meaningful argument for a policy is based on outcomes.

If the outcome of a conservative policy is more liberalism, it was never a conservative policy to begin with. That is the simplest and most reliable acid test of any “conservative” policy agenda.

Will Policy X put the country on a more liberal or conservative track?

The leading factor behind the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t come from Iraq. It came from Syria.

The theory that turned Al Qaeda into a regional monster didn’t come from Dick Cheney. It came from Obama’s Presidential Study Directive 11 which helped pave the way for the Arab Spring. The definitive speech that opened the gates of hell wasn’t Bush’s speech on Iraq, but Obama’s Cairo speech.

Al Qaeda in Iraq was a vicious terrorist organization before the Arab Spring, but it was not capable of menacing Baghdad with a sizable army while crushing numerically superior forces along the way.

First Mahmud applied for political asylum in Germany, but they said Nein. Then he came to America and filed for amnesty as an agricultural worker. (Remember all those complaints about how Americans just won’t pick lettuce? Terrorists won’t either, but they will file for amnesty that way while driving a cab and raising money for terrorists.)

His taxi was filled with Korans and Arabic books that Abouhalima would read at traffic lights, ignoring what was happening on the streets. Cassette tapes blared Arabic sermons. When Abouhalima spoke with Hockenberry, the cabdriver mentioned that America would lose the war against Islam.

The protest flyers contain the usual mutilated baby (an anti-war staple for any conflict even if the baby is now in his fifties) and claims that the US killed billions of Iraqis, trillions of Iraqi babies and wiped out every Iraqi IKEA.

Anyway “opponents of the US war machine” (elderly Trotskyists and bored college students) have held actions (held up signs) in such centers of US militarism as San Francisco, Auburn and Eureka. Any day now they’ll also protest in Olympia and Portland.

The Kurds were never gassed. And Stalin never killed anyone. Neither did Pol Pot. Just ask Noam Chomsky.

Or dig up Howard Zinn, if you have a ten foot pole, a strong stomach and tenure.

Al Jazeera is not a media outlet. It’s a projection of state power by Qatar. If you participate in a political takeover of one country by another, you can expect to suffer the consequences if you’re stupid enough to stick around when the Egyptians take back their country.

There’s a vast gulf of difference between a CNN reporter and an Al Jazeera reporter. CNN doesn’t work for the US government.

Al Jazeera employees are agents of a hostile regime. They’re being treated like enemy agents because that’s what they are.

You might think that a call by a major national veterans organization with 2 million members to boycott an entire country over the treatment of an imprisoned Marine would at least earn 2 inches of space in a few papers.

The media is happy to cover stories involving the VFW that are unfavorable to Republicans. Like this story in the Washington Post, “VFW attacks the three Republicans who voted against Senate VA bill”.

If the VFW criticizes Republicans, the Washington Post will cover it. If the VFW criticizes Obama or Mexico, it won’t.

It may well be the main reason the first black president of the United States has stood so firmly behind the first black attorney general of the United States: Holder has been willing to say the things Obama couldn’t or wouldn’t say about race.

“He’s a race man,” says Charles Ogletree, a longtime friend of Holder’s who taught and mentored Obama and his wife, Michelle, as Harvard Law School students in the 1980s. “He’s gone farther and deeper into some issues of race than the White House would like, but I know he has the president’s well-wishes. It’s clear [Obama and Holder] believe in the same things.”

The matchmaker who had brought the two couples together was the ever-present Jarrett…

Soon, other aides would be calling the threesome of Obama, Jarrett and Holder the “iron triangle.”

Iman Bugaighis, an orthodontist by profession, said, “They say it’s about religion, but we are Muslims ourselves as you know. How have we reached this place where a difference of opinion about headscarves ends in someone being killed?”

At his press conference with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, Obama took the time to denounce NBA Clippers owner Donald Sterling for racism.

And Obama took a “selfie” with the Islamic tyrant because he’s still basically a child.

The Great Reformer of Malaysia however has some thoughts on Al Qaeda.

“As proof — whether we agree or not is another matter — the group ISIL with the strength of just 1,300 people, can defeat an Iraqi army of 30,000 soldiers, until four, five generals with three, four stars run for their lives, jump out the window at night. Why? Because they are afraid of those who are brave,” he told more than 1,000 Umno members in attendance.

He also stressed the importance of being loyal to Allah, the party, and friends.

"I have not yet been notified of the nature of the complaint, but I have reason to believe that it was filed by the student who threatened to urinate on the classroom floor during my Wednesday afternoon math class."

Finally, lawyers don’t have a different set of morals than anyone else. Nuremberg established that doing your duty in a profession does not free you from basic human moral standards. You can’t gun down civilians because ‘that’s what soldiers do’. You can’t lie about a 12-year-old rape victim because ‘that’s what lawyers do’.

There are lawyers who do it. There are also soldiers who massacre civilians. There are doctors who involuntarily euthanize patients and cops who plant evidence at the scene of crimes.

By smearing a 12-year-old rape victim with false accusations, Hillary Clinton was not being a good lawyer. A good lawyer doesn’t do everything possible to win. Just as a soldier or a police officer doesn’t do everything possible to win.

There are things that we don’t do to win. Those who don’t understand that aren’t good lawyers or good soldiers or good cops.

For more than a millennium, Arab and Muslim honor resided, among other places, in their domination and humiliation of their dhimmi—and when the occasional reformer equalized their legal status, he struck a heavy blow to Muslim honor...

But culture is not a superficial question of manners. In the Middle East, honor is identity. Appeasement and concessions are signs of weakness: When practiced by one’s own leaders, they produce riots of protest, by one’s enemy, renewed aggression. Benjamin Netanyahu stops most settlement activity for nine months. Barack Obama goes to Saudi Arabia for a reciprocal concession he can announce in Cairo. King Abdullah throws a fit and the Palestinians make more demands. And too few wonder whether basic logic of the negotiations—land for peace—has any purchase on the cultural realities of this corner of the globe. If only Israel would be more reasonable …

When we indulge Arab (and jihadi Muslims’) concerns for honor by backing off anything that they claim offends them, we think that our generosity and restraint will somehow move extremists to more rational behavior.

I'd like to think that we have been woken from the long sleep of comfort, money, and ever-expanding special pleadings that have splintered us with the promise of bringing us together. But I know the temptation is always to roll over, hit the snooze bar, and try to grab a few more years of rest even as the enemies of our world patiently plan to assault us again and again, convinced of the weakness of our Nicoles, Ashleys, and Jasons, and the culture which created them.

Our mortal enemies possess, as they have shown, great patience. More patience than we have shown and far more commitment than we have shown to attaining their dark goals; our deaths. They are the Believers while we are still the Dreamers, waking only briefly to write down a few notes for discussion later in the week, during the hour when all that is in the world is really only about ourselves.

After much legal wrangling between the U.S. and the Iraqi government, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has confirmed the U.S. military will be sending 10,000 green berets to Iraq later this week, Duffel Blog has learned.

Hagel said the berets, described by the Pentagon’s logistics office as “beret, man’s, wool, rifle green, army shade 297,” were even now being loaded aboard an Air Force transport for immediate deployment to Iraq.

At a news conference at the Pentagon, Hagel said he received the directive in a brief phone call from the White House last week, when President Obama told him “to send as many green berets to Iraq as we could.” Hagel added, “We were a little puzzled why he didn’t want us to send something more useful, like special forces or military advisers, but orders are orders.”

“Whatever, they don’t pay me to think,” he said.

In response to Hagel’s statement, the White House spokesman Josh Earnest initially said that there had been some “linguistic confusion.” He later added that after careful deliberation President Obama has decided he likes this new plan much better, as it keeps American boots off the ground, and has halted the military’s current deployment of 300 barefoot American advisers to Iraq.

There are no "free elections" in the united states- ALL " candidates" are pre-selected by those in power and the selection go's to the one chosen by those in power. If a chosen "candidate" gets no votes at all he will "win" and the phony "vote count" will reflect whatever the politburo wishes it too . This is no more a "free country" than the old Soviet Union was. ---Ray